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UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES World War II Leaders and Their Visions for the Future of Palestine Gerhard L. Weinberg W A S H I N G T O N , D. C. World War II Leaders and Their Visions for the Future of Palestine Gerhard L. Weinberg J.B. AND MAURICE C. SHAPIRO ANNUAL LECTURE 31 JANUARY 2002 The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this occasional paper are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. First printing, March 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Gerhard L. Weinberg, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies annually appoints a distinguished specialist in Holocaust studies to pursue independent research and writing, to present lectures at universities throughout the United States, and to serve as a resource for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Center, government personnel, educators, students, and the public. Funding for the program is made possible by a generous grant from the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Charitable Trust. As a way of introducing my presentation, it would be best to explain where it fits into my current major research project. I am interested in trying to understand, as well as the available sources allow, how each of eight World War II leaders envisioned the postwar world, each of them assuming, of course, that his side would win. I also examine whether and how those visions may have changed during the war. The leaders on whom my attention is focused are Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Benito Mussolini, Charles de Gaulle, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Tojo Hideki, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this presentation I intend to draw out of the broader context of their views those that relate particularly to the future of Palestine in so far as these can be identified separately even if related to their broader visions of the postwar world. Something must be said first about the term “Palestine” in the context of the World War II era. When the Ottoman Empire was broken up in the peace settlements after World War I, a mandate, as this form of League of Nations supervised territory was called, was allocated to Great Britain in the Middle East, for a territory to be called Palestine. Initially it comprised all the territory now included in Jordan as well as the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. There were three types of mandates, A, B, and C, with the A-class of mandates expected to attain independence 2 • WORLD WAR II LEADERS AND THEIR VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF PALESTINE within a relatively short time, while the B mandates were expected to take longer, and the C mandates likely to be held almost indefinitely. The Palestine mandate was in the A category as were all the former Ottoman territories allocated as mandates to Britain and France. The expectation of the 1917 Balfour Declaration about the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine was included in the terms of the mandate. In 1922 the British government, for reasons we cannot review here, decided to partition the Palestine mandate into two separate mandates. The term Palestine was hereafter restricted to the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Since the remainder—by far the larger area—was across the Jordan from London, it was called Transjordan in typically colonialist fashion; you will understand that the people living there did not see it that way—from their perspective it was London that was on the other side of the river—and as soon as they could, they would change its name to Jordan. In this presentation, Palestine will refer only to the smaller, western portion of the original mandate, while the then current name of Transjordan will be used for the far larger country now called Jordan. What was the situation in Palestine in 1939? About one million Arabs and about half a million Jews lived in the mandate. In the immediately preceding years there had been an Arab revolt designed to halt Jewish immigration, drive out the Jews, drive out the British, and establish an independent Arab state as was simultaneously being established in Iraq and in much of the Arabian peninsula. The Jews living in Palestine defended themselves as best they could, while the British brought in large numbers of troops to put down the Arab uprising. By the winter of 1938–39, this had become the largest deployment of active duty British soldiers anywhere. A major change in British policy was proceeding in that winter; it had important implications for the situation in Palestine and all discussion of the mandate’s future. The government of Neville Chamberlain was moving from trying to appease Germany to preparing to fight the Third Reich if that proved necessary. This required building up a land army, not just an air force and a navy as had been the prior focus of British rearmament. Such an army would not only have to defend the Empire but by the creation of an expeditionary force assist France on the continent. This meant that a dramatic expansion was planned, an expansion that required the presence of the active troops deployed in Palestine to take part in building an army enlarged by Britain’s first- ever peacetime conscription. The other side of shifting from appeasing to confronting Germany was therefore a shift from confronting to appeasing the Arabs. This was Gerhard L. Weinberg • 3 believed necessary to free the troops in Palestine for duty in the United Kingdom, to preclude a massive siding of Arabs with the Germans in any open war, and also on the entirely correct assumption that large numbers of Muslim soldiers would have to be recruited in India for service in any and all theaters of war. While the government, therefore, was willing to make some changes in its domestic immigration policies after the November pogrom in Germany and to allow thousands of Jewish children—the Kindertransports—into Britain, strict limits were placed by the May 1939 White Paper on Jewish immigration into Palestine. In addition, an absolute veto on future Palestine immigration after five years was allowed to the Arabs. Furthermore, after some months delay, a dramatic restriction on Jewish purchases of land in Palestine was promulgated. Here, in other words, was the exact opposite of the “not in my backyard” syndrome. This was the situation when the Germans initiated World War II. During World War II, only six of the eight leaders I am studying concerned themselves with the future of Palestine. Chiang Kai-shek expected the restoration to China of all its territorial losses since 1894, the early return of Hong Kong, and some influence over a renewed independent Korea, but he was not thinking of territorial expansion. He was a vehement opponent of British and French colonialism, but all the evidence points to his focusing his attention in this regard on India, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific without much reference to the Middle East. The Japanese cabinet of Tojo Hideki proposed to the German government a division of Asia at the 70th degree longitude, which the Germans accepted. That confined Japan’s concerns to the territory from Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent to the lands on the western, southern, and eastern shore of the Pacific—quite enough one might think. So I will turn to the other six. Since Adolf Hitler started the war, I shall begin with him. In January 1939 he had first predicted that the Jews in Germany would be destroyed, and soon after had announced a similar fate for those in all of Europe. In November 1941, in a conversation to which I shall return in a moment, he explained that all Jews on earth would be killed. What do these policy expectations have to do with Palestine? To grasp this relationship, we have to look at the broader context of Hitler’s concept of the world at the end of World War II. As I have already mentioned, in addition to most of Europe, Germany would control all Soviet territory into Central Asia. That would include the oil wells of the Caucasus, a situation that fit in well with Hitler’s view that the Mediterranean and Middle East would be under Italian control. Germany’s African 4 • WORLD WAR II LEADERS AND THEIR VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF PALESTINE colonial empire would be a wide band across the middle of the continent, while the northern third would be in Italy’s empire. The German forces sent under Erwin Rommel to North Africa were, in the first instance, to salvage the North African portion of Mussolini’s empire and thus the Duce’s regime. But what of German military incursions into the Middle East in the course of hostilities? During World War II, the possibility of German armies entering Palestine arose on several occasions. In 1941 and in 1942 German ground forces twice came within striking distance of Palestine from the south—that is via Egypt from Libya—and twice from the north—that is through the Caucasus. It was on the first of the possible movements of German troops into the area through the Caucasus passes that Hitler explained his views at some length to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in November 1941.1 After informing Haj Amin el-Husseini that each European country in turn was being emptied of Jews, Hitler assured the Mufti that it would then be the turn of Jews living among “non-European” nations – in other words, the rest of the world. Assuming that the Mufti was not that concerned about Jews in places such as Tasmania and Bolivia, Hitler went into great detail about the fact that the one and only thing the Germans expected to accomplish in the Middle East was to kill all the Jews living in Palestine and other portions of the Middle East. The Mufti, who of course knew that there were then large numbers of Jews not only in Palestine but also in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, was pleased to receive this news. Hitler pretended that after German forces had arrived on the scene Berlin would issue the public proclamation in support of Arab independence that the Mufti repeatedly asked of the Germans; Hitler was careful not to explain that the whole area would be turned over to Mussolini’s Italy. It is essential to be clear on the point that Rommel was not urged on to Cairo so that the Germans could dismantle the pyramids and reerect them in Berlin but to provide the Germans with the opportunity to carry out what they did not trust their Axis partner Italy to do sufficiently thoroughly: the killing of all Jews in Palestine, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East.2 Needless to say, even if the Allies had won the war after the temporary loss of the Middle East to the Axis, no state of Israel would ever have been created in an area in which there was not a single living Jew. As you know, this condition did not arise because the Red Army held the Germans in the Caucasus and the British army held the Germans in the Western Desert, a subject on which I will comment again later. Gerhard L. Weinberg • 5 It is now time to turn to Benito Mussolini. Determined to change the Mediterranean into “mare nostrum,” our sea, and to reach outside it to the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, Mussolini had anticipated war with Britain and France from 1925 on, assumed that such a conflict could be waged successfully only in an alignment with Germany, and initiated major steps in that direction in 1934–35.3 The war to annex Abyssinia (Ethiopia), was a major step in this policy, and by the summer of 1938 the Italian navy was planning to seize the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean as an advance naval base.4 When Mussolini took Italy into the World War in June 1940, his territorial aims included, among other places, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Aden, and the Persian Gulf coast of Arabia.5 The French and British mandates in the Middle East— and that would include Palestine—were to be nominally independent but controlled by Italy, presumably under some form of Italian control.6 There was at least initially no reason for him to be concerned about competition from Germany in any of these areas; Hitler was fully prepared to let Mussolini have what he wanted. In fact, the German dictator was willing to let Italy have the island of Crete, which the Germans had seized at the cost of heavy casualties and in spite of the contrary advice of the German navy.7 As for the local population in the supposedly independent former mandates, Mussolini was as prepared to meet with and utilize the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as was Hitler—but he was just as unwilling to make any promise of Arab independence as his German ally.8 There is very little evidence of detailed attention to Palestine in the material on Mussolini’s vision of his Mediterranean empire; only the importance of the port of Haifa is repeatedly mentioned in the record. In view of Italy’s having to import virtually all of its oil, as well as his great interest in the projection of Italian power into the Indian Ocean, the focus of Italy’s leader on those aspects of taking over the Middle East and his neglect of other issues in that region are not difficult to understand. Italy had suppressed the local population in Libya with extreme violence, had followed this with a willingness to use poison gas massively in the war against Abyssinia, and could thus be expected to provide the Arab population of Palestine with an exceedingly brutal regime. By the time it acquired the mandate from its German conquerors, however, there would be no Jews alive in the area for the Italians to be concerned about. The next leader to be considered is Joseph Stalin. In any discussion of his views, one must begin with attention to certain of the Soviet dictator’s general assumptions and the policies derived from them. He always assumed that Great Britain